NOTE: Appium 1.5.3 is primarily a bug-fix release.

It also adds functionality to support for iOS WKWebViews3 and for automating the iOS Calendar app, as well as adding a capability to use abd for screenshots in Android web/hybrid sessions, selecting the correct version of Android emulator, and providing a list of Android activities to wait for on session startup.

Further, Android session reporting is increased, so that automation clients can get the device UDID for the automation session, as well as the currently running appPackage and appActivity.

General

• Allow --default-capabilities server argument to specify a file containing the default capabilities.
• Fix handling of statuses from proxied drivers (Chrome, Selendroid, etc.).
• Fix handling of browserName capability for Selenium Grid usage.
• Fix intermittent bug where creating a directory might crash the server.
• Fix handling of --session-override server argument.

iOS

• Add support for WKWebView-based webviews.
• Add support for automating the built-in Calandar app.
• Fix ios-debug-proxy-launcher.
• Fix bug where scrolling in Safari would crash.
• Fix handling of Safari in "new window" state.
• Fix handling of arguments for keys method so that clients that send an array do not fail.
• Clean up handling of ipa files for real device tests.
• Make sure processArguments parsing works.
• Fix iwd script to allow re-running.

Android

• Add nativeWebScreenshot capability, to use adb screenshots instead of ChromeDriver if necessary.
• Add support to auto-select device based on platformVersion rather than using first available device.
• Allow appWaitActivity to be a list of activities
• Fix setting wifi and data state
• Implement initAutoWebView capability.
• Report appPackage, appActivity, and deviceUDID when requesting session details.
• Make sure unlock app is closed at the end of a session so that the device works again.
• Fix handling of unlock to make less flakey.
• Make sure unicode encoding works correctly when strings are long.
• Fix handling of disableAndroidWatchers capability.
• Fix killing ChromeDriver on Ubuntu 16.04.
• Fix bug where early ChromeDriver failure crashed Appium.

https://discuss.appium.io/t/appium-1-5-3-released/10606